As the security of governments, organizations (e.g., businesses), and individuals continues to be threatened by various groups and individuals (e.g., terrorist groups and their members), it is increasingly important to identify future security threats (e.g., planned attacks) before they occur so they can be prevented. In many cases, security personnel (e.g., law enforcement officials) whose job it is to prevent or otherwise address security threats do not have access to the necessary information to identify those threats before they occur (e.g., information about the attack preparation activities of terrorist groups). In other situations, security personnel may have access to the necessary information, but the information may be obscured by an overabundance of irrelevant information. Finally, the intelligence information may be in an unanalyzed form from which it is difficult to identify the security threats. For example, vast amounts of information, such as reports and other communications, may be generated and exchanged by security personnel. Because of the volume of such information, it is not practical to expect a security organization to review every single piece of information and route it to the appropriate security personnel for further processing in a timely manner. As a result, some valuable information may be left unprocessed for quite some time, or it may never get processed at all. In addition, information about individuals may identify the same individual in different ways. For example, a name in a foreign language may have many acceptable but different English-language translations. In such a case, it may be difficult to identify the relationship between two pieces of information that relate to the same individual because of the differences in name-translation. In addition, various security systems (e.g., an FBI suspect database and an Interpol information system) may each contain different information that cumulatively would provide valuable intelligence, but individually each piece of information provides little insight. Moreover, various security systems may store their information in vastly different ways, languages, and formats. As a result, there has been very little integration of the information from these diverse security systems.
Accordingly, it would be beneficial to provide automated techniques for analyzing various types of information related to possible security threats and routing that information to appropriate security personnel for further processing and identifying of information that relates to suspect individuals and groups.